Global disasters such as the Asian tsunami and the Kashmir earthquake attracted more public donations last year, due to which the smaller charities in the U.K. have suffered financial crunch. One such organisation, the National Talking Newspapers and Magazines, U.K., lost up to a fifth of its income, in the year 2005.

As the funds started shrinking, the charity that produces recorded selections from newspapers and magazines for blind and visually impaired people feared closure.

Relief Riders International (R.R.I.) is a group of workers that go on horse back to remote villages to implement their mission to provide free medical aid.

According to the W.H.O. there are about 38 million blind people in the world and about 12 million of them live in India. R.R.I. is now poised to bring it’s ‘Give The Gift of Sight’ campaign to rural areas of Rajasthan as the majority of its population suffer from eye related illnesses.

Intelligent Bus Information System, (I.B.I.S.) should go a long way in ensuring travel is easier for visually impaired persons. At present, 12 bus stops across the Strathclyde region have been installed with the system.

The three-month pilot will allow vision-impaired bus passengers to use Brailled buttons to listen to the information.

For the first time, the United Nations will be able to print material directly in Braille. The credit goes to a donation of a state-of-the-art printer by the non-profit organisation, Services for the Visually Impaired, (S.V.I.), U.S.A., along with the World Blind Union (W.B.U.).

Harold Snider, Executive Director, S.V.I., said the high-speed, heavy-duty embosser would provide the U.N. with Braille production capacity in all six of the organisation’s official languages.

Visually impaired Elizabeth Goldring is a senior fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (M.I.T.) (U.S.), Centre for Advanced Visual Studies. Her ‘Seeing machine’ allows people with limited vision to see faces of friends, read or study the layouts of buildings they intend to visit.

Engineers at Carnegie Mellon University (C.M.U.) are developing affordable scanning systems to give blind people greater independence in daily activities, such as cooking, grocery shopping or riding a bus.

"The single biggest thing to a blind person is to have independence, to never have to ask a sighted person for assistance," said project leader Priya Narasimhan, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering. Narasimhan's venture is called ‘Trinetra’, a Sanskrit word referring to the powerful third eye of the Hindu god,’Shiva’.

‘Talk 64’, the first-of-its kind talking software will make playing the game of chess for visually impaired players much easier and simpler.

Talk 64 has a distinct audio feature. It will keep players informed about all the moves in the game and will also interact with the player continuously. Another interesting feature attached to the speech module of the software is its synthesizer. With the help of the synthesizer the voice (male or female), rate and volume of speech can be regulated.